Today, Prof. Chris Warhurst outlined four challenges for careers practitioners in supporting sustainable employment at the National Institute for Career Education and Counselling (NICEC) conference in Birmingham: advanced automation, the green industrial revolution, the disconnect between skills supply and demand, and unhealthy jobs.

Jenny Bimrose, Emeritus Professor at IER, and Tannis Goddard, PhD graduate at IER, have co-authored a new paper as part of an initiative by Future Skills Council, Canada, aimed at promoting the value of career development to post-pandemic recovery.

The paper explores challenges and some possible responses for career development practice in Canada, based on a thorough literature review of relevant international academic and grey literature, author participation in Responsive Career Pathways roundtables, and discussions with two key employees of Canada’s main career development professional associations/bodies.

The need for countries to provide appropriate support to all individuals making labour market transitions into, and through, volatile and complex labour markets is uncontroversial.

What is controversial is, despite this, that the professional identity of career counselling and employment practitioners across Europe remains somewhat fragile, partly because of the need to balance tensions around funding targets and reducing unemployment, with the individual needs of clients.

Maintaining professionalism can similarly prove challenging because time poor practitioners find it difficult to update their learning needs, continually, in the face of operational pressures, placing at risk their ability to familiarise themselves with new theories, research and ways of working.

This article by IER’s Jenny Bimrose and Alan Brown examined how career guidance counselling and employment practitioners can be supported at a distance using technology, to facilitate their professional identify transformation. Drawing on empirical results of European research (2014 – 2018), the article presents findings from an international online learning course designed to support practitioners’ professional identity across Europe and discusses the implications for practice.

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